Giant Skeletons-Newspaper Accounts #2

At the top is an illustration of some skulls associated with the newspaper clipping following and the colour picture below it ro different Neanderthal skulls and a modern Homo sapiens skull, reading from left to right (I rearranged the skulls in the top photo to the second row so they would correspond better to the examples in the colour photo)eems that among these various reports of giant skulls and skeletons there are definite strains of both CroMagnons and Neanderthals, and then a category of mixed breeds with somewhat intermediate features. THe raw material of the mound builder giants seems to have come from some of the mixed types, because some of the mixed types were very large, at least as large as the CroMagnons (The modern human in the middle of the top photo is also an EXTREMELY largen skull, with an unusuallu large cranial capacity. Any one of these types can have a greater than normal sized cranial capacity in American skulls generally the large-moderns have the largest braincases)












200,00 years old is about right for Homo heidelbergensis, but they need not have been in North America that long. Louis Leakey suggested about half that old for the Calico Hill site and that might be better.

























The cross sign is very important to North American natives quite outside of the Spanish and it denotes the Four directions or Four winds. The skull is of the Old World CroMagnon type, the basic PaleoIndian.
These skulls are interesting because they illustrate three of Neumann's types of skulls: the one in back is the Archaic type of the Eastern Woodlands and has been compared to Iberiands and Western Europeans of the postglacial era. The skull on the left is of the Basketmaker type out of the Southwest USA and the type also goes back into the Archaic: this one has a markedly African character. The associations of the peoples in these two areas with the Iberians and North Africans is insisted on by Barry Fell: older books would have called the Basketmaker skull "Negroid" because this one is very pronouncedly African (Others are more nearly Mediterranean in type) The one very high head to the right in front is something out of one of the CroMagnon types, but it has become very short and high. In addition this individal had a form of artificial deformation apack of the head in an unusual slanting way-but this variation is also known to be the product of a specific type of artificial cranial deformation. This is a skull which is tending to be like the Adenas, and the Adenas are the ones that are most often at the base of "Giant Mound burial" stories. Female Adenas could average six feet tall or over and males at seven feet tall or over according to Robert Silverberg in the standard work The Mound Builders. antic individuals would go up from that point. Below is an Adena mound, mostsimilar to the conical mounds built in Europe by the more recent and shorter, high-headed population there. The culture that built Stonehenge also built conical mounds like this and they were remembered in Folklore as Giants.